“The air force leadership adventure camp?” I asked, shoving him hard in the shoulder. “The one in Washington? How are you this stupid? You know that they’ll be able to track whether or not you’re there, right? One phone call from your mom or my mom or Sid and you’ll get caught. And that means I’ll get caught!”
“No one is getting caught doing anything,” he said. “Sid’s ex is running the camp. He said that he’d keep my name on the roster for all three seminars. He’s even going to mail a T-shirt here so I can wear it on the flight home. Did you make plans for a mock trial T-shirt?”
I goggled at him. “What? No. That plan sucks. Sid’s ex could slip up. Sid could go back to base early and decide to come visit you and no amount of free T-shirts is going to save you. You need to go home. Now.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “Let me take a selfie of us real quick—”
He started to reach into his pocket and I kicked him, hard, in the shins. I could hear my Muay Thai instructor crying foul. You were never supposed to hit someone who wasn’t padded. But the rules needed to be broken for blackmailing douche-canoes.
“Ow!” he whined, taking two steps away from me before I could smash his nose into his brain. “It’s mutually assured destruction, El—Ever. If anyone finds out that I’m here, then you have to go home, too. And then we’ll both end up at the academy. I need this scholarship. My dad isn’t going to pay for me to disappoint him.” His mouth twisted into a mocking smile. “Not that you’d know anything about that.”
Fear flashed through my system, raising the hairs on my arms. How disappointed would my parents be if I won the Melee? Would I have to leave for college on the same midnight train, with no one to hug me good-bye?
I swallowed, struggling to hold on to my rage as I glared at my cousin. “You’re running away.”
“Duh. So are you.”
“Did you just ‘duh’ me? Who says ‘duh’? How did you even qualify for a place here?”
The door to the dining hall swung open. Cornell-the-counselor’s head popped out. He was already smiling. It was possible that he never stopped smiling. It was obnoxious.
“Hey, Ever,” he crowed, like we hadn’t seen each other in years. “Everything okay?”
“Great, good, thanks,” I grunted.
He took a step out, aiming his goodwill and two-pump handshake at Isaiah. “Cornell Aaron. I’m one of the counselors here.”
“Isaiah Lawrence,” Isaiah said, his voice dropping down to match Cornell’s postpubescent bass. “Sorry, I got here late. My flight was late. I guess my sister had the right idea, taking the train.”
It took a second for me to catch up with that statement. Before I could open my mouth to point out that we were cousins, Cornell was bobbing his head and saying, “No sweat, man. Good to meet you. I think you’re on my Melee team.”
“Cool.” Isaiah bobbed his head back. “I didn’t think I’d see any other brothers up here. You hear things about Oregon, you know?”
I tilted my head back and cringed at the cloudless sky. Even the darkest recesses of my brain wouldn’t have been able to conjure up a moment more horrifying to me than this.
“The camp’s very diverse,” Cornell said, regaining his bearings. “You guys should head back inside. Wendell’s going to announce the teams soon.” He waggled a finger at us. “No collusion. I don’t care if you’re twins.”
My jaw flopped open as he disappeared inside again.
“Twins?” I spluttered at Isaiah. “Twins? We don’t look anything alike.”
“We’ve both got Grandpa’s eyes. Everyone says so.”
“Everyone” being Grandmother Lawrence.
Really, Isaiah and I both had buggy eyes—round, with a lot of eyelid. And we weren’t exactly the same shade of brown, but we were both dark. Darker than the Lieutenant. Darker than Cornell-the-counselor.
After that, all comparisons ground to a halt. Isaiah’s head was almost perfectly square. Mine was round. My legs took zero pit stops from the ground to my shoulders, whereas Isaiah was built like a satyr, with stubby little bowlegs. I’d always be taller than him by at least an inch.
“We’re the same age,” he said with an irritating calm. “We’d have to be twins.”
“I’m a year older than you!”
“We’re both seniors. And everyone at camp has to be at least seventeen. Like enlisting.”
“But you aren’t seventeen.”
His face split into a maniacal grin. “I am now, Sis. Mutually assured destruction.”
“This is some racist bullshit,” I said. “I am not going to spend all summer pretending to be your sister. I don’t even like being your cousin. I’m not upgrading our genes because of one color-struck counselor.”
“Hey, you’re the one who stole my last name. It’s an understandable mistake.”
“It’s my name, too, you—”
“You heard the man,” he interrupted, with an infuriating chuckle. “We need to head back. I haven’t eaten since I left for the airport. Who was that girl you were sitting with? I saw her bust a soda on some skinny kid when I got here. She better not have touched my sandwich.”
I followed him back inside, feeling like most of my more vital organs had been replaced with steel wool. There was no argument to make him leave. If I tattled, I was screwed. We’d both end up at home, grounded until we left for the academy together next year.
On the same plane.
In the same cadet training.
If one of us didn’t win the scholarship at the end of the Melee, we’d be shackled together for the next five years.
Mom was right. I couldn’t choose my deployment. I’d ended up in my first combat zone—a liberal arts college in the second-largest city in Oregon, crawling with geniuses and kamikaze roommates. And my entire future rested on the hope that Isaiah didn’t take both of us down in a rain of friendly fire.
“You’re going to have to be nicer to me, now that we’re twins,” he said as we walked back toward Leigh.
What nonsense, said Oscar Wilde. I haven’t got a brother.
6
“This is a competition, not a bacchanalia,” Bryn Mawr shouted at the eight campers sitting in a circle around her, as she stabbed the makeshift flag into the ground. The hot pink poster board attached to the top of the wooden dowel read “Team Six” in silver glitter. “I go to an all-girls’ school. If I can keep it in my pants for twenty-one days, so can you.”
“Whoa, whoa, Mary-Anne,” the Rayevich counselor next to her said. “I really don’t think that we need to—”
Leigh pulled me away from their group. “Are you sad that you and Isaiah aren’t on the same team?”
Wendell Cheeseman had announced all of the Melee teams before we’d been excused from the dining hall. Every team had eight campers—four boys from the same floor, four girls from the floor above them. Isaiah was one floor below mine, but too far to the side to end up on my team. Thank God.
“No,” I said. “We don’t really get along.”
No matter what ideas Isaiah had about us playing nice for the summer, there was no way that this was going to build into some movie moment. There would be no tearful confessions or hugs of understanding.
First of all, Lawrences didn’t hug.